


we're burning one hell of a something

by TheElusiveOllie



Category: Marble Hornets, Undertale (Video Game)
Genre: Based on RP, Gen, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Nonbinary Character, suicide ideation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-28
Updated: 2017-04-28
Packaged: 2018-10-24 20:22:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,073
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10749132
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheElusiveOllie/pseuds/TheElusiveOllie
Summary: Legends say that those who climb the mountain never return.





	we're burning one hell of a something

**Author's Note:**

  * For [The_Birds_And_Bees](https://archiveofourown.org/users/The_Birds_And_Bees/gifts).



He drives until the rain stops. When he pulls over, he’s pretty sure he’s crossed state lines. He’s running low on gas and pills and just about everything, but he’s already scraping the bottom of the barrel in terms of credit card debt and stretching himself out on the remnants his student loans will allow him, so that narrows his options down significantly. No dinner, and certainly no motel; tonight he’ll sleep in his car with the windows up and the doors locked.

That, or he’ll finally scrape enough of himself together to do the brave thing.

Even a bitter joke doesn’t feel like a joke anymore. His fingers twitch as he reaches for the pack of cigarettes he doesn’t have in his pocket, because he reached the point where he had to pick between feeding his addiction and eating well enough to drive, and unfortunately the latter had to take precedence. Still, muscle memory needles at his hands, and the headache renews its dull, steady throbbing behind his temples the moment his thoughts turn to nicotine.

It would’ve killed him slowly; too slowly. Not that he doesn’t deserve the slow way out well enough, but that’s not why he’s here. He’s here for gas and food, and that’s it.

The gas station is small, grimy, contained. The bored lady at the counter scans his items, her gaze having acquired the glassy patina that all people in customer service inevitably obtain. Jerky and trail mix don’t count as a fancy meal, but it’s something, and it’ll keep the worst of the convulsions away when the meds can’t. He catches himself shooting a longing look at the coffee dispenser even if the stuff inside must taste downright terrible; it always does in his experience. Like nuclear-fried battery acid.

A continuous tone drills its way into his head at the thought of caffeine, and he unsuccessfully tamps it down. He’s been stripped of his vices through financial necessity and not through any want or will or idea of his own, but that doesn’t mean they don’t make their voices well heard.

He dumps his spoils back in the car but doesn’t plunk back down into the driver’s seat. He braces his arms against the doorway, lower his forehead until it rests against one forearm. If he slits his eyes open he can still see the crisscrossed cobwebbing of faded white marks. Ghostly, almost. Too pale. Too faded.

But still - there.

Tim twists around to scan the landscape, his gaze dull, tired, empty. His eyes flick across the scenery of browns and yellows, befitting the crisp and autumnal air.

The only landmark of note is the singular mountain that stretches out from the ground in a great, cavernous lump: ungentle and inelegant, its slope curving upwards into almost a point before it rounds itself off at the peak. A perfect spot for moments both final and profound, for the termination of everything you’ve built yourself up to be. Or dug yourself down into becoming.

Someone with a better sense of dramatic wording might’ve called it fate, the thing that finally galvanizes him into action, into treading across a bare, utterly empty landscape, eyes set on the silhouette that gradually comes to dominate his immediate vision. Without hesitation, Tim starts to climb, one foot digging into the rock and shale after another, pouring whatever remaining strength he has into generating the force necessary to get himself _up_ the damn thing. It’s a steep climb, chunks of dislodged gravel skidding down the sloping sides the longer he goes, and several poor choices of footholds leave him bracing palms to the grit, sweat-slicked fingertips coming away with the cling of dust and the faint burn of having to catch himself before the slip turns into something worse.

It’s instinctive, is the thing. It has to be. Years of unwillfully keeping himself alive for other people’s sake, and the moment he’s told he has to live for himself? Boy.

Boy.

Wasn’t _that_ a good one.

Too bad he finds himself disinclined to laugh, most days. There’s all sorts of jokes he could spin, morbid humor he could dispense upon the nonexistent audience. There’s the one about the guy who got himself shot in the gut. The one about the guy who got stabbed through the throat. The one about the guy whose best friend sent him plummeting to his death. The one where everyone should’ve lived happily ever after, except they all found themselves caught up in a years-old revenge narrative they never should’ve been a part of. 

There’s the one where everyone knows exactly whose fault it is, and yet - he’s the only one that clawed himself out of the damn mess. 

Call it reverse karma.

It’s slow going, the hair sticking to the nape of his neck as the incline starts to even out, despite the sinking sun and the inexorable creep of the marginally cooler night air. He halts, just for a moment - to catch his breath, to brace his hands across the caps of his knees as he half-stoops over. The smoker’s cough never really leaves, it turns out. He shuts his eyes, huffs long and slow out from his nose, and straightens up with a bracing roll of his shoulders. Won’t be long now. Won’t _matter_ for very long at all.

The mountain rounds itself off, and just ahead, he could _swear_ there’s a sheer drop, the ridged, torn-paper edges of a cliff yawning open just at the mountain’s summit, inexplicable and perfect, like the earth simply opened itself up into a ragged hole where was most convenient for people like him.

For people like the other person he doesn’t expect to find here, but find he _does._

Their back’s to him to start with; a silhouette limned in the fiery red of a rapidly fading sunset, the fringes of their hair lent a particularly spectacular cast of bronze. His footsteps drag to a gravelly halt, and it’s clear just from the slight jump to their shoulders, the twitch of their head, the subtle shift to snare him in their peripheral vision, that they’ve heard him.

They’ve heard him, and they must not have expected - or _wanted_ \- company.

Tim halts.

It’s difficult to discern much in the dimming light, with the dipping sun at his front, but there’s an immediate flare of something approaching shock or anger before their expression smooths, a disdainful downward curve to the side of their mouth. Initially he thought they must’ve been sitting down, but it becomes clear the longer that he watches, such isn’t the case.

They’re just...small.

A kid.

A flare of distant memory balls one hand into a fist at his side, scratching at the stained denim of his jeans; remembering what it was to hear every sound and footstep and subtle skid of a rock over the grass as something to be feared. Living in perpetual fear that the door would bang open and the wrong person - _not a person at all, really_ \- would be standing there, ready to make him hurt.

Could be wrong. Could be way off base, really. That’s the hope, in any case - that no one else lived the way he did, in blind terror of a faceless specter of his own nightmares. It’s seldom if ever that simple, particularly with the legions of nameless YouTube users he left in his wake, the _hundreds of us! Thousands!_ he insisted Alex could be wrong about.

More likely there’s a perfectly mundane explanation to that hitch to their shoulders, the rigidity of muscle, the way they’re standing at the precipice of the chasm at the mountain’s summit like they’re anticipating the need to jettison themself off it. There’s probably a perfectly mundane joke to go along with it.

He wets his lips, his throat dry from an hour or so of unexpectedly rough hiking without water, and coughs. Once, twice, fist over his mouth, and the child continues to watch him, unblinking, clearly anticipating some sort of reaction on his end.

Said reaction, when it comes, is probably just as underwhelming as the man himself.

“Hi,” says Tim.

The kid says nothing. They simply continue to look at him, neither turning around completely nor averting their gaze. Expecting something else, maybe?

Their expression is locked and unchanging, and Tim’s not exactly what he would refer to as a scintillating conversationalist, more likely to grunt a monosyllabic response to Jay’s endless queries than anything else, and it’s not as though he’s had a great deal of people to practice talking to in the past few weeks. Months. Cash registers and gas station attendants don’t make for excellent discussion.

Neither, it turns out, do reticent, perpetually on-edge, possibly-suicidal kids.

He tries again.

“Sorry,” says Tim, with a humorless, self-pitying sort of fake chuckle, “guess I wasn’t really expecting anyone else to be...y’know. Up here.”

The kid says nothing. 

Again, there’s no real visible shift in their visage. Like maybe they’re trying to figure him out. Or maybe they’re just waiting for him to take a step forward, to make some sort of indication that he’s a threat on the level of a bomb to be dismantled. Waiting for a _tell_ of some kind, as to what kind of person he might be.

Can’t say he blames them. Years ago, he wouldn’t have trusted a visibly nervous, disheveled, exhausted lump of an adult either.

He shifts tack.

“So,” says Tim. “What’re you doing up here?”

For the first time, their eyes flick downward and then up again, a sharp, assessing look. And, slowly, they pivot on one heel, half-facing him. Still looking about ready to bolt at any second. Probably should, if he’s honest. 

He opens his mouth to offer another question, a vague attempt at further conversation, fully anticipating a continuation of the same silence he’s been getting, when much to his surprise, the kid actually _responds._

“The same as you, I’d imagine.” Their voice is low-pitched with thinly-concealed scorn, a cold, detached commentary: on the state of his clothes, bedraggled, of his sweat-stained and dirt-streaked exterior, of every clear sign that he never really _intended_ to climb up here. It simply happened. And the longer he looks -

There’s a redness crusted about the clenched knuckles of one fist. Hair smoothed down, but not quite enough to mask the flyaway strands, the sticking of a lock or two to their forehead that proves it was a rushed job. The strained and stretched hem of their sweater. The split at their lower lip. 

They didn’t mean to come up here either, it seems.

Maybe, like him, they were running from something. Either way, he hangs back.

“Yeah,” he says at last, gaze flicking tiredly to the open temptation, the mountain’s gaping maw, lying before the pair of them.

The kid seems to take that as a tacit invitation of some sort. They shift their weight, subtly, rocking back on one heel to shuffle to one side by increments, keeping him locked in their periphery.

That, too, is in its own way, an invitation. He shouldn’t - shouldn’t place himself forward like that. Shouldn’t, and _couldn’t._ He’s ruined enough lives. He’s inflicted himself on enough people. He’s damaged enough of the world by sheer virtue of his existence alone. He should turn around, _run,_ leave this kid to whatever devices they’ve got going on, as if he doesn’t already _know,_ as if that knowledge isn’t clenched sickly in the pit of his gut like a tumor. If he walks away _now,_ they can go back to contemplating whatever it is they’re contemplating, and he can - what? Wait his _turn?_

He should turn back. Head all the way down, and ignore the soft slip and crunch that would follow.

He should turn back.

He takes one step, tentative, and when they continue to look at him, crosses the rest of the way until he’s a pace or two behind them, far enough away for them to keep him in their sights.

They’re right up at the edge, the emptiness beneath plunging away into a murky drop that sips at the toes of their sneakers. It’d be easy as rocking forward, as losing your balance, as walking backwards just a little too far.

The breath catches in his throat, a sharp pang of vertigo rocking his balance when he peers over, and he glances back up at the horizon quickly, the even line of distance, the milk-white fingers of dying sunlight establishing the world’s darkened edge.

“Legends say that travelers who climb Mt. Ebott never return.”

He glances at the kid, sidelong, at the words that run smoothly out like a recitation. They’ve clasped their hands behind their back now, as though standing just outside the principal’s office.

“Is that why you’re here?” says Tim, tiredly.

“Is that not why _anyone_ is?” the child counters with an evenness he should find unsettling. Should, but finds he is simply too exhausted to.

God but he wants a smoke. The itch pulling at his fingertips, at his lips, at the places under his skin. Wants to light one up right here and now, even if he’d be tainting a kid’s lungs in the process. What kind of person does that make him, huh?

“I dunno,” says Tim, unable to bite the tremor out of the words. “Hell of a view up here.”

The kid’s gaze flicks to him, briefly, and then back down again.

The lack of poise, the evenness of their disposition, all of it lends itself to the impression that they’re not likely to take that final step, not just yet. Maybe not as long as he’s here.

He hunkers down, dropping into a crouch. Partially to give his legs a damn break. Partially because it places him on the kid’s level. Again there’s that tightening of their musculature, maybe wholly involuntary, the preempts any movement made on his part, a clenching anticipation of something...worse, maybe. 

Something that leaves a kid’s lip split and their knuckles bloodied.

“Tim,” he adds, finally. “Name’s Tim.”

The kid nods. The movement is sharp, disconcertingly jerky. Like the introduction took them aback.

“I am - ”

They halt, mid-sentence, brow dimpling in a frown.

Then, briefly, they smile. It’s a knowing, almost vindictive curve to their lips, something their rosy cheeks lend themselves to particularly well.

“Chara,” says the child, decisively. “I am Chara.”

Tim hums his acknowledgment, nodding. Unusual name, but it’s got its own nice ring to it. Kinda up there in the gender neutral territory, but everything about the kid practically screams ambiguity. Asking would invite a veering of the conversation into a territory he’s pretty sure he’s ill-equipped to handle, and things have only really started to reach a point where the kid can be, if only barely, comfortable enough sharing their name. 

“Sounds like a set-up for a bad joke,” he says, wishing he had the ease of a smile that they did. Never could force something like that to come along easy. Blame it on the state of his brain. “Two strangers meet on a hilltop, waiting to die.”

There’s a momentary jolt in his chest, the fear that he’s overstepped, that he’s made an assumption, that he’s said something wrong - not helped by the way Chara’s chin jerks as they fix the entirety of their stare upon him in all its powerful, incisive, unnerving glory.

Then they smile. It’s softer along its edges than before, even if the laugh they bark out after is as sharp as their demeanor.

“ _Waiting_ ,” they repeat, circumflecting the word with a condescending lift. “That implies they have no choice.”

“Well, do they?” He lifts one shoulder in a lazy, partial shrug. “We’re all _waiting_ to die. In some way or another.”

Sometimes it just comes quicker to some than it does to others.

Whether or not they deserve it.

Chara pauses. Their gaze slides away from him to appraise the horizon, just for a moment. Just in time to watch the last gleam of sunlight fade from a diffuse egg-yellow to nothing at all, blending easily into a uniform, vespertine purpled black.

“I suppose you’re not wrong there,” they say quietly.

Just from the look of them, they can’t be any older than...what? Ten? Eleven? It’s hard to say, especially given the low light, but the fact that their mind defaults to that kind of thing, that they’re even standing up here at all, that’s a sickening reality check in and of itself. But the scratches on their hands, the discolored patch on their cheekbone that he’s pretty sure is a bruise - that just lends itself to the idea that they’ve got some pretty damn good reasons for _why_ they think that, and why they’re here.

Just like the faint latticework of scars across both his arms are proof enough that he has his own reasons. Hard to say if they’ve noticed, in this kind of light, but the kid’s sharp. He wouldn’t put it past them.

He wouldn’t put it past them knowing what scars like that mean.

“Shall you be going first,” says Chara, derailing that line of thought with a decidedly casual air, “or shall I? Brains before beauty, do you think?”

Tim snorts, a humorless rasp of air.

“Well, I dunno.” He scratches at his nose as he lets his gaze fall back to the empty pit in the ground before the pair of them. “Won’t lie. I kinda didn’t think...I mean, if it was just _me,_ I’m pretty sure I’d already be - y’know.”

“Dead and dying?” Chara contributes wryly.

“Pretty much.”

“Why wait?” There’s a deceptively cheerful lilt to the words, a sugary-sweet inflection that has them chirping it out brightly. “I assure you, I’ll be right behind you." 

The effect might’ve been creepy, if he hadn’t already seen the stuff of his nightmares come to life in the most terrifying way imaginable. Takes a little more than a spooky tone of voice and a cheerily grinning child to send a chill racing up through him.

“Yeah,” says Tim, drawing the word out several syllables past its termination, “for some reason, I’m not finding that real reassuring.”

“Your loss,” says Chara.

He arches an eyebrow at them, uncertain and pretty damn sure that they’re reading his uncertainty down to the muscle, down to the facial twitches and the set of his stance. Not particularly uncertainty when it comes to the course of action he’d like to take, no; nothing like that. Mostly it’s just an uncertainty as far as this kid’s concerned, the unknown, unanticipated variable that’s somehow been more successful at diverting the roadmap of his thoughts than anything else has been, thus far.

It’s concrete proof that he’s not sitting his ass with people who might not have any idea at all. Because they’re here, discussing with frank nonchalance the self-applied, preferred method of their own death, and so they - _get_ it, don’t they? They’ve been pushed to that literal and metaphorical edge and have now balanced on precarious knifepoint, looking over. If he hadn’t happened along, they might’ve already been gone.

They probably would have, come to think of it.

It’s not a feeling he’d wish on anyone, much less a fucking _kid_ ; that quiet, subdued realization that you’d kind of like your own existence to peter to an unspecified, undramatic halt, as easily and offhandedly as you might hope a dog stops barking, or a car alarm stops honking.

He’s already talked to them. Knows their name, and now they know his. And he could, conceivably, like they’ve said - walk away, and pretend it didn’t happen. He _could,_ even if he knows he can’t, in good faith, let that sit with him, marinating in his gut and turning his blood to arsenic. He could follow, or he could lead, but both options would mean the kid makes good on their initial plan.

Chara.

A kid.

A kid who can’t be older than ten, or eleven, maybe. Who deserves more than some anonymous asshole standing on the top of a mountain, smelling of gasoline and secondhand smoke who will probably end up poisoning their head with thoughts of an unbidden nightmare, assuming they live.

They deserve better than him, and they deserve better than _this_ \- whatever put them here. ‘Cause there’s nothing more grimly, coldly distressing than seeing someone who’s seen so _little_ of things, but has seen enough to know they want no part of it.

He’d know.

That was him, once.

He runs a hand through his hair, scraping it back before it flops back into his eyes in sweat-clumped streaks; unwashed after days on the road, and probably stinking as much as the rest of him. He eyes them, every inch of them. The blood, the stitches out of place, the bruises they aren’t making any attempts to hide.

He exhales through his nose, short and sharp.

“C’mon,” says Tim.

Chara looks at him with a mixture of what seems to be intrigue and disdain, though the latter takes obvious precedence.

“Excuse me?” The child’s voice is as chilled as the breeze that tears at their hair and the edges of their clothing.

Tim jerks a thumb over his shoulder.

“Let’s get outta here,” he says.

One side of their mouth twists into a scowl that’s much more intent and effective at communicating how they feel about that suggestion.

“I fail to see why I would,” says Chara, sedately.

Tim digs around in his pocket before retrieving what he’s looking for. He runs his thumb over the contours of it, once, before tossing it in a high, parabolic arc. It glints in the reflected moonlight, swinging above their heads easily in a silvered crescent before Chara reaches up with both hands and catches it, clumsily, their unshakable facade momentarily spoiled by the way they have to stumble slightly, fumbling at it with scarred fingers before they can hold it with any of their practiced ease.

The corner of Tim’s lip twitches. It’s not a smile. He can’t smile easily, but Chara, it looks like, smiles a little _too_ easily. So maybe between the pair of them, things even out.

He buries his hands in his pockets, shoulders lifting in a minute shrug.

“Got some people down the hill you might wanna visit.”

\--

Chara watches the conflagration with a strangely unmoored look to them, the hot orange throwing their too-rosy cheeks, the too-tidy trim of their hair, into sharp relief. They’re no longer smiling. Instead, they simply watch the inferno chase the wood of the porch, lighting everything up in a string of yellow before wicking onto the rooftops. The lawn is an untamed mess, and it’s a fire hazard. It joins the rest soon enough. Chara stands on the safety of the heat-warmed pavement, a sidewalk greasy with the midday’s rain and humidity, their hands motionless at their sides. Flakes of ash swirl, highlighted in the glow of the flame as they swirl like dust motes, sparking ember-bright for mere seconds before they’re swallowed by the dark.

The house’s floorboards spritz to life in an agonizing series of creaks, wood cracking as it’s steadily charred to ash. Eventually, the entire place starts to assume a lopsided look to it, and Tim is reminded, bizarrely, of melting ice cream.

He’d always liked vanilla. It was the kind his favorite nurse would let him have, after he got the news that his mother wouldn’t be visiting. Like a consolation present. As if that made it better. 

He watches Chara watch the fire, and waits for them to turn to look at him.

Their expression is blank, their eyes flinted.

“Let’s go,” says Chara. They have to lift their voice to enunciate cleanly over the crisp roar of the flames backlighting them, bathing wisps of hair in a halation of red and gold.

It’s not entirely clear what they mean by that. But then, Tim’s the one with the car and the food and the means to “go” anywhere. He’s the one that handed them the keys to the disorganized, impromptu destruction of the world that torqued them into what they are now. They could do a lot better than him, he can’t help but think dryly.

It’s just their luck that they don’t seem to have anyone else.

Tim nods. 

“Okay,” he says.

Behind them, the house crumbles to ash.

**Author's Note:**

> For Bird, forever. It's the crossover no one really wanted or needed, but if it does something to communicate the simultaneous desolation and camaraderie of knowing what someone else has been through, it's worth writing.
> 
> Title comes from the song "Burn" by Ellie Goulding.


End file.
